By EUGENE BINGHAM political reporter
Violent offenders may be sent home on parole in electronic shackles as part of a plan to curb alarming re-imprisonment rates among the country's toughest criminals.
Figures issued yesterday show that nearly 75 per cent of maximum and "high-medium" security prisoners land back inside within 12 months of being released.
Corrections Minister Matt Robson said the Government was considering expanding the home detention scheme to include inmates released on parole, a move it hopes will reduce the high recidivism rate.
But his strategy came under immediate fire from victims' rights groups and Opposition MPs, who said the answer to cutting crime was locking up criminals for longer rather than sending them home in electronic anklets.
The Department of Corrections yesterday published its first "recidivism index" in its annual report, giving the re-imprisonment and re-conviction rates for offenders within 12 months of their sentences ending.
Nearly half of these inmates had another conviction within a year. A third had been sent back to prison.
Re-imprisonment rates were highest for maximum and high-medium security inmates (74 and 73 per cent), but much lower for those in minimum security (26 per cent).
Mr Robson said the Government was examining proposals to toughen parole criteria so it would be harder for the worst offenders to be released at all.
Those just below that category would be more closely watched through home detention.
The scheme was begun last year as an alternative to prison for those given terms of less than two years.
An electronic device - worn as a band locked around the ankle - allows a security company to monitor their whereabouts 24 hours a day.
Mr Robson said expanding the programme to prisoners freed on parole would give an extra level of supervision for violent offenders.
"There is the grey area of people whom you have to let out because you don't have any specific indications or proof that they will re-offend but there is a doubt," he said.
"What we will try to do is to give that extra element of security for a particular group of people at the end of a sentence."
But Act MP Stephen Franks said Mr Robson was trying to cut inmate numbers because he had promised that prisons would not become a growth industry.
"It has nothing to do with justice or protection of innocent people."
Department papers which Mr Franks obtained showed policy experts had warned that overseas experience indicated breaches remained high among those sentenced to electronic monitoring.
Greg Stenbeck, whose son was engaged to Auckland murder victim Kylie Jones, said that while the home detention initiative could work for most paroled prisoners, it should not be considered for the most violent.
Mr Stenbeck said home detention would never work for psychopaths such as Kylie's killer, Taffy Hotene.
The only option was to lock such people up forever
'Get out early' plan to cut re-jailing rate
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